Before I open my mouth. His throat scales shift color, a wave of response, gold spreading from the gland line, and I haven’t said a word. He’s ten feet away and his body just reacted to something my body is doing that I’m not even conscious of yet.
And I realized something else.
“You reacted before I did,” I say. My voice is quiet. “Just now. Your scales flushed before I felt it spike. You responded to a shift in my chemistry before I was conscious of it.”
He doesn’t move.
“You can read me. Biochemically. You can smell what I’m feeling.”
“Ruelle.”
“How long?”
“Since the beginning.”
“Since the beginning.” I hear myself repeat it. “You’ve known what my body was doing this entire time. Every bite. Every examination. Every time I leaned toward you and pulled myself back and wrote notes in the notebook. You already had the information.”
“Yes.”
“I told you I was attracted to you. I disclosed it. I reported it as a variable because I thought you didn’t know, and I thought honest data required honest disclosure, and you sat there and let me make that speech and you already knew.”
“It’s involuntary,” he says. “I can’t turn it off. I taste the air and your chemistry is there.”
“But you can choose to tell me. And you chose not to.”
“I chose to let you have your body’s privacy.”
“That’s not what you did.”
The silence is ugly. The silence of a breach.
“Can you tell me what you’re reading?” I say. “Right now. In real time. So the information goes both ways.”
“Yes.”
“Then do it. What am I feeling right now?”
He looks at me. Reads me. “Anger,” he says. “Frustration. Arousal.” A pause. “And something I don’t have a word for that smells like the beginning of permanence.”
My eyes burn. I don’t cry.
“Good,” I say. “Keep doing that.”
The silence after his words is different. Naming what he smells cost him something; I see it in his face, the muscles under his scales shifting.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have told you.”
“Yes.”
“I was afraid that if you knew, you’d leave.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“I know.” His voice cracks on the word. “That’s the part I can’t stop smelling.”
The silence holds. I’m still angry, still standing here with the anger in my chest like a stone. But the permanence. He said permanence.
I take one step toward him, one step with the anger still in me, and it’s enough.
